Caleb Beers
Caleb Beers is an American vlogger and self-styled "rough approximation of a philosopher." His videos are mostly philosophy themed, but also cover topics in politics and the future of education. He also hosts a bi-weekly live-stream with co-host Matthew Laine, running one to three hours from 3 PM EST every Friday and Saturday. He also writes on a variety of platforms linked to from his YouTube channel. Rough Approximation Caleb's self-description is an inside joke among his followers, relating to an argument with a person over whether one could be a philosopher without working at a university. He had asked his opponent whether or not Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume were philosophers, since none of them worked at a university. His opponent responded that they were "rough approximations of philosophers" and not real philosophers, so he adopted it as a title. Political Views Beers is highly critical of left-wing politics, and this is intertwined with Caleb's critique of modernity. His viewer base thus overlaps with that of many right-wing YouTubers. The difference is that he takes a theoretical and abstract angle on politics, preferring to espouse the philosophical foundations of his view than to point directly at its political applications. Likewise, his criticisms of left-wing thought are mostly theoretical, aimed at attacking its philosophical foundations rather than arguing policy directly. His social criticisms are more practical, but still aim at taking examples of specific problems and exposing their basis in more general phenomena. He also communicates his social criticism through fiction, as in his video, "His Inherent Decadence." One example of his his social criticism is in his video on the infamous interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman, where he plays clips from the video and dissects them piece by piece, using each example to make a broader point. This is, at present, his most-viewed video, and was tweeted by Peterson himself. Philosophical Views Beers describes himself as a Platonist, and seems to tend toward the views of German philosophers on aesthetics, making reference to the sublime in several of his videos. He also seems to reject materialism. Beers' social philosophy shows a marked influence from Nietzsche, and he has spoken favorably of Heidegger, Evola, and Guenon. Many of his videos, and much of his writing, focuses on a critique of modernity. This critique is complex and laid out fully in his book, Hubris, but the gist of it is that modernity is basically unworkable and blind to its own failures because its perspective is founded on a rejection of the very things that cause it to fail. For example, modernity rejects the idea of human nature, at least once modernity reaches its postmodern phase, but modernity is also incompatible with human nature and cannot notice that it is incompatible because it rejects the idea of human nature in the first place. One of his arguments for Platonism is inductive: he says that, in the history of philosophy, there have been many attempts at rejecting realism about abstracta, but that these attempts always fail because they end up re-introducing abstracta in a different form, which ought to clue us in to the fact that rejecting abstracta causes intractable problems. Category:Users that joined in 2016 Category:Male YouTubers Category:American YouTubers Category:YouTube Vloggers Category:Commentary YouTubers